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Promiscuous Preys

In all methods used to detect protein-protein interactions, false positives can occur, i.e. interaction signals are detected from proteins which never interact under natural conditions. Many of these are due to proteins that have the tendency to generate interaction signals an a non-specific way. In large-scale yeast two-hybrid screening, these "sticky" or "promiscuous" prey proteins are identified based on their frequent appearance among the preys. Other false positives are due to technical artefacts not related to the nature of the prey protein, such as mutations in the bait protein, or the reporter construct. Technical artefacts are in most cases single events. Exclusion of interaction pairs that are observed only once takes care of most of the technical artefacts.

Below there is a list of the most sticky preys that have been observed in our lab. While in general some of the so-called sticky preys are proteins which actually do have a large number of natural binding partners, the top ten proteins in the list below are very likely to be artefacts when isolated in our yeast two-hybrid system.

This table lists the most promiscuous ("sticky") preys found in human GAL4-based Yeast Two-Hybrid cDNA libraries. To the left, the prey protein's gene symbol is listed, next to this the number of different bait proteins that have led to the isolation of these preys, and to the right the source of the library in which this prey has been found most frequently. 

Preys which are seen to bind to many different baits probably interact with the baits non-specifically, e.g. by binding to the GAL4-part of the hybrid protein, or activate the Yeast Two-Hybrid reporter independent of an interaction of the bait with the prey.

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